Significant research and development effort is currently being applied to produce various types of extremely dense materials with useful electronic, magnetic, and/or optical properties, which find particular use in information storage, processing, and display applications. For example, research efforts are currently directed towards developing bi-stable optoelectronic materials with molecular rotors that can be placed in several stable positions with respect to a rigid molecular framework, and can consequently store a bit of information within a region of the material limited in size only by the cross-section of a light beam used to access the bit of information. In future materials, a bit of information may be stored in the orientation or electronic state of a single, asymmetrical molecule, or even in the spin state of a trapped subatomic particle. Molecular electronics may enable not only extremely dense storage of information, but may also yield an enormous decrease in power consumption, a decreased need for heat dissipation, and an increase in the speed by which the physical states that encode logical memory values can be altered, or switched. To the extent that molecular-electronic components can be coaxed to self-aggregate from precursors, subunits, or readily synthesized molecular subassemblies, manufacturing costs per bit greatly decrease.
Unfortunately, as with most things, the spectacular advantages potentially provided by molecular electronics may be achieved only after various problems are overcome. Many of the new materials theoretically useful in information storage, processing, and display applications are manufactured by sandwich-like assembly of organic and organometallic compounds into molecular-film layers on a substrate to produce a complex, multi-layered material. In many of these materials, the desirable properties useful for information storage and display accrue from an ability to orient molecular subassemblies, such as molecular rotors, within the materials in particular directions, using electric fields. However, reliable and robust manufacture of the layered molecular materials, in many cases, remains elusive, and, in many other cases, the stacking and orientations of molecular layers may be disrupted or destroyed by repeated electronic access to information stored within them. For these reasons, research scientists, technologists, manufacturers, and system designers have recognized the need for improved methods of manufacturing layered materials and for new, layered materials that do not suffer deterioration or destruction when electrically, optically, or magnetically accessed.